


his limbs will not obey

by Serindrana



Series: i've seen the flash of teeth [3]
Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Decay, Gen, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-11
Updated: 2013-06-11
Packaged: 2017-12-14 14:54:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/838150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serindrana/pseuds/Serindrana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Water mixes with the blood in his lungs. No air is left. It has all escaped in red-tinged bubbles rapidly ascending to the surface. All his clothing and equipment drags him down away, away from the storm clouds and the searchlights and-</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Emily.</i>
</p><p>Corvo is dead - but refuses to stay that way. Not in the main <i>i've seen the flash of teeth</i> continuity, but related in theme.</p>
            </blockquote>





	his limbs will not obey

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lamprey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lamprey/gifts).



He chokes as he hits the water, before it can pour into his wide-open mouth, past his broken teeth or swollen tongue. There's already blood in his throat and lungs, drowning the life from him even as he slips beneath the crashing, surging waves. His eyes bulge in their sockets, and he tries to drag his way back to the surface.

His limbs do not obey him.

Above him he can see the hull of Samuel's ship where it dips below the waves. He can see the propellor that slowly begins to move again. Vague against the shifting patterns of light and dark at the surface, Samuel's silhouette leans over the side, as if searching for him.

He hears the dull crack moments before he sees the bullet spinning towards him, parting the water. It slows but doesn't slow enough; it pierces his belly, and the pain makes his world go blinding white.

Water mixes with the blood in his lungs. No air is left. It has all escaped in red-tinged bubbles rapidly ascending to the surface. All his clothing and equipment drags him down away, away from the storm clouds and the searchlights and-

 _Emily_.

Kingsparrow Island is reduced only to a dark mass somewhere beyond where he is, and disappears as everything around him goes dark.

* * *

The glow of mark on his hand is the only light he can see by, now, and it illuminates nothing except its shape. The hagfish have gnawed at his flesh and eyes and hair, but they have left the mark alone. His eyelids are gone, nibbled away to shreds, and his eyes will be next; but still he sees the mark on his hand.

It has been _time_ since Samuel shot him through the throat and belly. He doesn't know how much time, only that time has passed, some amorphous, twisting, hulking thing between him and the surface. His belts and bullets drag him down to the bottom of the river, and there he is buried in silt and debris. He feels it only distantly. He knows it only hazily.

 _Emily_.

Emily is still above the waves. He feels a flash of anger, of desperation, originating from the marked flesh. His consciousness resides there, now, throbbing in the darkness of the river bottom. It is white hot and vicious. Emily is alive; he knows this. Emily is with vipers. Their stiltswalkers shake the earth and their whale oil-powered edifices flash and strike in the night. She is safe, yet she is not. She will never be safe without him.

* * *

His flesh has begun to separate from his bones by the time the tides and the storms bring his corpse crashing into the island. The waves buffet him, drag him up, push him higher. He collides with stone again, sharp edges breaking open bloated skin.

His hands flex, tendons and bones and the mark the only things left. He grabs hold of a cluster of barnacles. They cut at him.

The Outsider purrs in his ear that no longer has a shell to protect it, " _You are a forceful man, Corvo,_ " he says. Corvo doesn't hear him so much as _feel_ him, as know him in the dark. There is no black-eyed man watching him now. There doesn't need to be. He has moved past the necessity of the flesh. It has dropped away from him with every bottom-feeder that has crawled over his old coat, over his face that is no longer a face. " _It's been a long time since I've witnessed something like you. You fascinate me._ "

His jaw opens. He works it, relearns it. His tongue has been eaten, and so he will never speak to Emily again- but that hardly matters. What matters is that he has relearned motion. He has drawn his consciousness out from the mark on his hand and into the wreckage of his old body, and now he climbs, letting the waves help him crawl up the rain-slicked, salt-stinging breakwaters.

He stands.

The Outsider whispers in his soul as he discards his pistol, his bullets. They won't work now. The salt has corroded the mechanism of his crossbow- and of his blade. His grenades are useless. He is left with only his hands.

" _Will you press on until your bones fall to dust? Or is this your last mission? What will you do, if you save her? She will scream, Corvo. She will run from you. She will sob and howl and beg you not to_ ** _be_** _. What will you do?_ "

He doesn't think of futures. He thinks only of the first guard's neck as it snaps between his hands. He stoops and takes the man's sword as a new guard appears, rushes at him. He sees it all in bursts of motion, in burning flashes of knowledge. He strikes down each overseer, each guardsman, each navy bruiser that they send against him. Bullets punch into his flesh; he does not feel them. Alarms screech; he does not hear them.

They cannot stop him.

" _Treavor Pendleton died six days ago from a bullet wound to his stomach. You will not find him here_ ," the Outsider says, as Corvo stands in a room with blood streaking the floor. He wants to rip each member of the conspiracy to shreds, cast them into the waves, delight as they are eaten, howl with joy as they are turned into shit. But Treavor Pendleton is gone. He moves on.

Another bullet punches into his chest, and he staggers from it. Somewhere inside of him, bits of flesh tremble and spasm.

In his pocket, another heart beats. When the man who shot him is dead, his jaw ripped from his skull, Corvo takes a moment to draw out the mass of muscle. It quivers in his hand. It is untouched, uneaten.

Corvo pulls aside his coat and his skin, slips his hand through his rotting diaphragm, and makes a spot for the heart. He shoves it in with reckless force.

It beats inside of him. His mark flares.

The Outsider chuckles.

" _A bold move. Do you wish for her strength, as well? Then you may have it_."

And suddenly he is not only the remnants of Corvo Attano, but he is the howling loneliness and confusion and madness of a woman he once knew to her innermost parts. The heart beats fast in his chest, augmentations scraping at the walls of his ribs.

"What have you done to me," rasps from his clotted throat.

He staggers onward.

The incendiary bolts cannot catch his flesh or clothes on fire; he is waterlogged and resolute, and he is made of deep and icy things. He catches the marksman around the throat, and tosses him over the side of the walkway. His screams echo, then die away.

"I am so cold," his mouth babbles. "What is this place? The metal is salted with wind and water and blood. Do not continue. Do not continue!"

His limbs obey him; he climbs the tower.

Martin looks out over the ocean. He does not turn as Corvo approaches, not until the carpet five inches from the balcony is sodden through, and Corvo begins to reach for him. Then the man turns, and stares down the rotted face of death before him. He puts a pistol to his temple.

Corvo howls as vengeance is taken from him.

Havelock sits in a study. He carefully loads bullets into his pistol. He levels it at Corvo as he opens the door, and empties six shots into Corvo's head, throat, chest, belly, abdomen, and groin. Corvo's mouth ceases to move. The second heart shivers and stammers in his chest.

He picks himself off the floor where the force of the bullets has splayed him, and he breaks each of Havelock's finger bones, each of his toes, each of his limb bones, and then he pours whiskey down the navy man's throat until he ceases to sputter.

He turns around to find Emily watching him, wide-eyed, crying the way an Empress learns how to: silently, with poise, with heartbreaking restraint.

And then she runs. Corvo cannot keep up with her. His limbs obey, but are rotten through. He staggers. The second heart inside of him shrieks with pain as the bullet passes through it, back and forth with the motion of his body. He chases Emily through the halls, past the body that once held treacherous Teague Martin, out into the pounding rain that has come on, out over the bridge home. He will chase her home, if he must. He will chase her to a safe place.

Ahead of him, she slips. She falls. She crashes over the guardrail and she plummets, headlong into the water below.

Corvo howls, the first sound of his own that he can remember. The second heart inside of him seizes. He rushes to the bridge, and then he, too, is falling over the side, reaching for her.

Her little body hits the waves before his. She dies on impact. The height is too great.

Inside of him, the second heart whispers words he cannot hear. The beating halts.

The water accepts him as its own; it is the only thing left to him. The brackish water winds its way into his wounds, into the broken places inside of him. The mark on his hand flares.

" _This was not the way I thought it might end_ ," the Outsider murmurs, and Corvo sinks to the bottom of the bay, chasing the white of Emily's clothing. But a current catches him and bears him out towards the sea, where a vast darkness waits. He claws at the tide.

It does not relent.

His limbs will not obey.

His consciousness retreats to the mark on his hand.

The world goes dark.


End file.
